Chapter XXIX. The Abyss of Ignorance (1902)

The Education of Henry Adams

by Henry Adams

THE years hurried past, and gave hardly time to note their work.
Three or four months, though big with change, come to an end before
the mind can catch up with it. Winter vanished; spring burst into
flower; and again Paris opened its arms, though not for long. Mr.
Cameron came over, and took the castle of Inverlochy for three
months, which he summoned his friends to garrison. Lochaber seldom
laughs, except for its children, such as Camerons, McDonalds,
Campbells and other products of the mist; but in the summer of 1902
Scotland put on fewer airs of coquetry than usual. Since the terrible
harvest of 1879 which one had watched sprouting on its stalks on the
Shropshire hillsides, nothing had equalled the gloom. Even when the
victims fled to Switzerland, they found the Lake of Geneva and the
Rhine not much gayer, and Carlsruhe no more restful than Paris; until
at last, in desperation, one drifted back to the Avenue of the Bois
de Boulogne, and, like the Cuckoo, dropped into the nest of a better
citizen. Diplomacy has its uses. Reynolds Hitt, transferred to
Berlin, abandoned his attic to Adams, and there, for long summers to
come, he hid in ignorance and silence.

Life at last managed of its own accord to settle itself into a
working arrangement. After so many years of effort to find one's
drift, the drift found the seeker, and slowly swept him forward and
back, with a steady progress oceanwards. Such lessons as summer
taught, winter tested, and one had only to watch the apparent
movement of the stars in order to guess one's declination. The
process is possible only for men who have exhausted auto-motion.
Adams never knew why, knowing nothing of Faraday, he began to mimic
Faraday's trick of seeing lines of force all about him, where he had
always seen lines of will. Perhaps the effect of knowing no
mathematics is to leave the mind to imagine figures -- images --
phantoms; one's mind is a watery mirror at best; but, once conceived,
the image became rapidly simple, and the lines of force presented
themselves as lines of attraction. Repulsions counted only as battle
of attractions. By this path, the mind stepped into the mechanical
theory of the universe before knowing it, and entered a distinct new
phase of education.

This was the work of the dynamo and the Virgin of Chartres. Like
his masters, since thought began, he was handicapped by the eternal
mystery of Force -- the sink of all science. For thousands of years
in history, he found that Force had been felt as occult attraction --
love of God and lust for power in a future life. After 1500, when
this attraction began to decline, philosophers fell back on some vis
a tergo -- instinct of danger from behind, like Darwin's survival of
the fittest; and one of the greatest minds, between Descartes and
Newton -- Pascal -- saw the master-motor of man in ennui, which was
also scientific: "I have often said that all the troubles of man come
from his not knowing how to sit still." Mere restlessness forces
action. "So passes the whole of life. We combat obstacles in order to
get repose, and, when got, the repose is insupportable; for we think
either of the troubles we have, or of those that threaten us; and
even if we felt safe on every side, ennui would of its own accord
spring up from the depths of the heart where it is rooted by nature,
and would fill the mind with its venom."

"If goodness lead him not, yet weariness May toss
him to My breast." Ennui, like Natural Selection, accounted for
change, but failed to account for direction of change. For that, an
attractive force was essential; a force from outside; a shaping
influence. Pascal and all the old philosophies called this outside
force God or Gods. Caring but little for the name, and fixed only on
tracing the Force, Adams had gone straight to the Virgin at Chartres,
and asked her to show him God, face to face, as she did for St.
Bernard. She replied, kindly as ever, as though she were still the
young mother of to-day, with a sort of patient pity for masculine
dulness: "My dear outcast, what is it you seek? This is the Church of
Christ! If you seek him through me, you are welcome, sinner or saint;
but he and I are one. We are Love! We have little or nothing to do
with God's other energies which are infinite, and concern us the less
because our interest is only in man, and the infinite is not knowable
to man. Yet if you are troubled by your ignorance, you see how I am
surrounded by the masters of the schools! Ask them!"

The answer sounded singularly like the usual answer of British
science which had repeated since Bacon that one must not try to know
the unknowable, though one was quite powerless to ignore it; but the
Virgin carried more conviction, for her feminine lack of interest in
all perfections except her own was honester than the formal phrase of
science; since nothing was easier than to follow her advice, and turn
to Thomas Aquinas, who, unlike modern physicists, answered at once
and plainly: "To me," said St. Thomas, "Christ and the Mother are one
Force -- Love -- simple, single, and sufficient for all human wants;
but Love is a human interest which acts even on man so partially that
you and I, as philosophers, need expect no share in it. Therefore we
turn to Christ and the Schools who represent all other Force. We deal
with Multiplicity and call it God. After the Virgin has redeemed by
her personal Force as Love all that is redeemable in man, the Schools
embrace the rest, and give it Form, Unity, and Motive."

This chart of Force was more easily studied than any other
possible scheme, for one had but to do what the Church was always
promising to do -- abolish in one flash of lightning not only man,
but also the Church itself, the earth, the other planets, and the
sun, in order to clear the air; without affecting mediaeval science.
The student felt warranted in doing what the Church threatened --
abolishing his solar system altogether -- in order to look at God as
actual; continuous movement, universal cause, and interchangeable
force. This was pantheism, but the Schools were pantheist; at least
as pantheistic as the Energetik of the Germans; and their deity was
the ultimate energy, whose thought and act were one.

Rid of man and his mind, the universe of Thomas Aquinas seemed
rather more scientific than that of Haeckel or Ernst Mach.
Contradiction for contradiction, Attraction for attraction, Energy
for energy, St. Thomas's idea of God had merits. Modern science
offered not a vestige of proof, or a theory of connection between its
forces, or any scheme of reconciliation between thought and
mechanics; while St. Thomas at least linked together the joints of
his machine. As far as a superficial student could follow, the
thirteenth century supposed mind to be a mode of force directly
derived from the intelligent prime motor, and the cause of all form
and sequence in the universe -- therefore the only proof of unity.
Without thought in the unit, there could be no unity; without unity
no orderly sequence or ordered society. Thought alone was Form. Mind
and Unity flourished or perished together.

This education startled even a man who had dabbled in fifty
educations all over the world; for, if he were obliged to insist on a
Universe, he seemed driven to the Church. Modern science guaranteed
no unity. The student seemed to feel himself, like all his
predecessors, caught, trapped, meshed in this eternal drag-net of
religion.

In practice the student escapes this dilemma in two ways: the
first is that of ignoring it, as one escapes most dilemmas; the
second is that the Church rejects pantheism as worse than atheism,
and will have nothing to do with the pantheist at any price. In
wandering through the forests of ignorance, one necessarily fell upon
the famous old bear that scared children at play; but, even had the
animal shown more logic than its victim, one had learned from
Socrates to distrust, above all other traps, the trap of logic -- the
mirror of the mind. Yet the search for a unit of force led into
catacombs of thought where hundreds of thousands of educations had
found their end. Generation after generation of painful and
honest-minded scholars had been content to stay in these labyrinths
forever, pursuing ignorance in silence, in company with the most
famous teachers of all time. Not one of them had ever found a logical
highroad of escape.

Adams cared little whether he escaped or not, but he felt clear
that he could not stop there, even to enjoy the society of Spinoza
and Thomas Aquinas. True, the Church alone had asserted unity with
any conviction, and the historian alone knew what oceans of blood and
treasure the assertion had cost; but the only honest alternative to
affirming unity was to deny it; and the denial would require a new
education. At sixty-five years old a new education promised hardly
more than the old. Possibly the modern legislator or magistrate might
no longer know enough to treat as the Church did the man who denied
unity, unless the denial took the form of a bomb; but no teacher
would know how to explain what he thought he meant by denying unity.
Society would certainly punish the denial if ever any one learned
enough to understand it. Philosophers, as a rule, cared little what
principles society affirmed or denied, since the philosopher commonly
held that though he might sometimes be right by good luck on some one
point, no complex of individual opinions could possibly be anything
but wrong; yet, supposing society to be ignored, the philosopher was
no further forward. Nihilism had no bottom. For thousands of years
every philosopher had stood on the shore of this sunless sea, diving
for pearls and never finding them. All had seen that, since they
could not find bottom, they must assume it. The Church claimed to
have found it, but, since 1450, motives for agreeing on some new
assumption of Unity, broader and deeper than that of the Church, had
doubled in force until even the universities and schools, like the
Church and State, seemed about to be driven into an attempt to
educate, though specially forbidden to do it.

Like most of his generation, Adams had taken the word of science
that the new unit was as good as found. It would not be an
intelligence -- probably not even a consciousness -- but it would
serve. He passed sixty years waiting for it, and at the end of that
time, on reviewing the ground, he was led to think that the final
synthesis of science and its ultimate triumph was the kinetic theory
of gases; which seemed to cover all motion in space, and to furnish
the measure of time. So far as he understood it, the theory asserted
that any portion of space is occupied by molecules of gas, flying in
right lines at velocities varying up to a mile in a second, and
colliding with each other at intervals varying up to 17,750,000 times
in a second. To this analysis -- if one understood it right -- all
matter whatever was reducible, and the only difference of opinion in
science regarded the doubt whether a still deeper analysis would
reduce the atom of gas to pure motion.

Thus, unless one mistook the meaning of motion, which might well
be, the scientific synthesis commonly called Unity was the scientific
analysis commonly called Multiplicity. The two things were the same,
all forms being shifting phases of motion. Granting this ocean of
colliding atoms, the last hope of humanity, what happened if one
dropped the sounder into the abyss -- let it go -- frankly gave up
Unity altogether? What was Unity? Why was one to be forced to affirm
it?

Here everybody flatly refused help. Science seemed content with
its old phrase of "larger synthesis," which was well enough for
science, but meant chaos for man. One would have been glad to stop
and ask no more, but the anarchist bomb bade one go on, and the bomb
is a powerful persuader. One could not stop, even to enjoy the charms
of a perfect gas colliding seventeen million times in a second, much
like an automobile in Paris. Science itself had been crowded so close
to the edge of the abyss that its attempts to escape were as
metaphysical as the leap, while an ignorant old man felt no motive
for trying to escape, seeing that the only escape possible lay in the
form of vis a tergo commonly called Death. He got out his Descartes
again; dipped into his Hume and Berkeley; wrestled anew with his
Kant; pondered solemnly over his Hegel and Schopenhauer and Hartmann;
strayed gaily away with his Greeks -- all merely to ask what Unity
meant, and what happened when one denied it.

Apparently one never denied it. Every philosopher, whether sane
or insane, naturally affirmed it. The utmost flight of anarchy seemed
to have stopped with the assertion of two principles, and even these
fitted into each other, like good and evil, light and darkness.
Pessimism itself, black as it might be painted, had been content to
turn the universe of contradictions into the human thought as one
Will, and treat it as representation. Metaphysics insisted on
treating the universe as one thought or treating thought as one
universe; and philosophers agreed, like a kinetic gas, that the
universe could be known only as motion of mind, and therefore as
unity. One could know it only as one's self; it was psychology.

Of all forms of pessimism, the metaphysical form was, for a
historian, the least enticing. Of all studies, the one he would
rather have avoided was that of his own mind. He knew no tragedy so
heartrending as introspection, and the more, because -- as
Mephistopheles said of Marguerite -- he was not the first. Nearly all
the highest intelligence known to history had drowned itself in the
reflection of its own thought, and the bovine survivors had rudely
told the truth about it, without affecting the intelligent. One's own
time had not been exempt. Even since 1870 friends by scores had
fallen victims to it. Within five-and-twenty years, a new library had
grown out of it. Harvard College was a focus of the study; France
supported hospitals for it; England published magazines of it.
Nothing was easier than to take one's mind in one's hand, and ask
one's psychological friends what they made of it, and the more
because it mattered so little to either party, since their minds,
whatever they were, had pretty nearly ceased to reflect, and let them
do what they liked with the small remnant, they could scarcely do
anything very new with it. All one asked was to learn what they hoped
to do.

Unfortunately the pursuit of ignorance in silence had, by this
time, led the weary pilgrim into such mountains of ignorance that he
could no longer see any path whatever, and could not even understand
a signpost. He failed to fathom the depths of the new psychology,
which proved to him that, on that side as on the mathematical side,
his power of thought was atrophied, if, indeed, it ever existed.
Since he could not fathom the science, he could only ask the simplest
of questions: Did the new psychology hold that the IvXn -- soul or
mind -- was or was not a unit? He gathered from the books that the
psychologists had, in a few cases, distinguished several
personalities in the same mind, each conscious and constant,
individual and exclusive. The fact seemed scarcely surprising, since
it had been a habit of mind from earliest recorded time, and equally
familiar to the last acquaintance who had taken a drug or caught a
fever, or eaten a Welsh rarebit before bed; for surely no one could
follow the action of a vivid dream, and still need to be told that
the actors evoked by his mind were not himself, but quite unknown to
all he had ever recognized as self. The new psychology went further,
and seemed convinced that it had actually split personality not only
into dualism, but also into complex groups, like telephonic centres
and systems, that might be isolated and called up at will, and whose
physical action might be occult in the sense of strangeness to any
known form of force. Dualism seemed to have become as common as
binary stars. Alternating personalities turned up constantly, even
among one's friends. The facts seemed certain, or at least as certain
as other facts; all they needed was explanation.

This was not the business of the searcher of ignorance, who felt
himself in no way responsible for causes. To his mind, the compound
IvXn took at once the form of a bicycle-rider, mechanically balancing
himself by inhibiting all his inferior personalities, and sure to
fall into the sub-conscious chaos below, if one of his inferior
personalities got on top. The only absolute truth was the
sub-conscious chaos below. which every one could feel when he sought
it.

Whether the psychologists admitted it or not, mattered little to
the student who, by the law of his profession, was engaged in
studying his own mind. On him, the effect was surprising. He woke up
with a shudder as though he had himself fallen off his bicycle. If
his mind were really this sort of magnet, mechanically dispersing its
lines of force when it went to sleep, and mechanically orienting them
when it woke up -- which was normal, the dispersion or orientation?
The mind, like the body, kept its unity unless it happened to lose
balance, but the professor of physics, who slipped on a pavement and
hurt himself, knew no more than an idiot what knocked him down,
though he did know -- what the idiot could hardly do -- that his
normal condition was idiocy, or want of balance, and that his sanity
was unstable artifice. His normal thought was dispersion, sleep,
dream, inconsequence; the simultaneous action of different
thought-centres without central control. His artificial balance was
acquired habit. He was an acrobat, with a dwarf on his back, crossing
a chasm on a slack-rope, and commonly breaking his neck.

By that path of newest science, one saw no unity ahead --
nothing but a dissolving mind -- and the historian felt himself
driven back on thought as one continuous Force, without Race, Sex,
School, Country, or Church. This has been always the fate of rigorous
thinkers, and has always succeeded in making them famous, as it did
Gibbon, Buckle, and Auguste Comte. Their method made what progress
the science of history knew, which was little enough, but they did at
last fix the law that, if history ever meant to correct the errors
she made in detail, she must agree on a scale for the whole. Every
local historian might defy this law till history ended, but its
necessity would be the same for man as for space or time or force,
and without it the historian would always remain a child in
science.

Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by
motion, from a fixed point. Psychology helped here by suggesting a
unit -- the point of history when man held the highest idea of
himself as a unit in a unified universe. Eight or ten years of study
had led Adams to think he might use the century 1150-1250, expressed
in Amiens Cathedral and the Works of Thomas Aquinas, as the unit from
which he might measure motion down to his own time, without assuming
anything as true or untrue, except relation. The movement might be
studied at once in philosophy and mechanics. Setting himself to the
task, he began a volume which he mentally knew as "Mont-Saint-Michel
and Chartres: a Study of Thirteenth-Century Unity." From that point
he proposed to fix a position for himself, which he could label: "The
Education of Henry Adams: a Study of Twentieth-Century Multiplicity."
With the help of these two points of relation, he hoped to project
his lines forward and backward indefinitely, subject to correction
from any one who should know better. Thereupon, he sailed for
home.